Questioning western universality: Sōseki's Theory of Literature and his novel Kusamakura

Focusing on the relation between the literary theory and the novels of modern Japanese writer Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916), this article argues that we need to include more ‘non-Western’ theories in the discussions of world literature. Furthermore, it concludes that a world literature contextualization of Sōseki's theory helps explain how his novels critically negotiate the influences from Western literature in Japan. By comparing Sōseki's theoretical and literary writing, this article shows continuity between his Theory of Literature and his novel Kusamakura, arguing that both question Western universality in defining literature. In other words, the comparison stresses Sōseki's continued preoccupation with understanding the transformation of literatures due to global interaction. During the modern period, such transformation was probably nowhere more conspicuous than in Meiji Japan, where not only society but also its literature was rapidly changing.     

Crisis ideology and the articulation of fascism in interwar Japan: the 1938 Thought-War Symposium

In early 1938, the newly formed Cabinet Information Division (Naikaku jōhōbu) held a closed-door Thought-War Symposium (Shisōsen kōshūkai) in Tokyo with over 100 bureaucrats, military officers, media executives and academics in attendance. While the ostensible purpose of the symposium was to discuss propaganda following Japan's full-scale invasion of China in July of 1937, the presentations had very little to do with the practical coordination of information. Rather, the symposium participants brought their specific areas of expertise to bear on elaborating the curious term ‘thought war’ (shisōsen), a term that had only recently been used with any regularity but which had become invested with critical urgency following the invasion of China.

In the conventional literature, the term ‘thought war’ is understood as marking a new modality of state propaganda as Japan moved towards a total war system. However, this reading overlooks the ideological investments in thought war discourse, as well as how ‘thought war’ inherited a multivalent sense of crisis that had crystallized around thought and culture earlier in the 1930s. In this article, I explore how the 1938 symposium reveals a combined sense of historical crisis and an urgent call for the total overhaul of Japanese state and society, a combination which, I argue, underwrote the development of fascism in Japan. I trace how three earlier discourses of crisis – the ‘Manchurian Problem’, the ‘thought problem’ and the ‘movement to clarify the kokutai’ – converged within thought war discourse, thus investing it with fascist urgency.     

The masochist's masquerade: Kōno Taeko's ‘Beautiful Girl’ (Bishōjo)

Kōno Taeko is notorious for her literary masochism, which critics tend to read solely through the narrow lens of psychoanalysis. This article contends that we gain new insights into Kōno's literary life and corpus when historical contexts are also brought to bear. In reading closely ‘Bishojo’ (Beautiful Girl, 1962), a story that appeared at the same time as Kōno's most famous award-winning stories in the early 1960s, I contend that Kōno's fictional world can best be grasped with attention to two key factors: the impact of Kōno's wartime girlhood on her fiction; and, in ‘Bishōjo’ in particular, the Occupation Period (1945–1952) context, which serves as more than mere background to the story's revenge plot. Girls, or shōjo, form the core of the story and expose the disavowed shōjo at the core of protagonist Shōko's psyche. To survive, Shōko must cloak her masculine strengths in a masochistic masquerade indistinguishable from femininity itself. She threads her masochistic masquerade between two abusive men whose efforts to humiliate her cannot be separated from the national Occupation context and postwar masculinity. Finally, this essay demonstrates that Kōno's masochism functions as a literary technique for constructing subjects differently by gender in historical contexts, thereby exposing the psychic distortions that only fiction, as a light into the darkened interior world of human beings, can illuminate.     

Ethnosexual frontiers in queer Tokyo: the production of racialised desire in Japan

Recent years have seen a worrying rise in anti-Korean and anti-Chinese xenophobia in Japan. This xenophobia has pervaded many aspects of Japanese society, and the gay male community in Tokyo's Shinjuku Ni-chōme is no exception. Drawing upon an ethnographic study of Ni-chōme and interviews conducted with Japanese, Chinese and South Korean men, this article utilises Nagel's theory of the ethnosexual frontier to examine how certain racial identities are rendered illegitimate in Ni-chōme. I argue that the stratification of Ni-chōme into spaces where only certain ‘racialised desires’ (minzokuteki na seiyoku) are legitimated reflects broader ideologies of racial identity that circulate throughout Japanese society. I discuss how Chinese and South Korean men understand themselves as ‘ethnosexual sojourners’ who visit Japan to form long-lasting romantic relationships with Japanese men, striving to adopt Japanese ethnosexual mores. I juxtapose the Chinese and South Korean men's narratives with the voices of Japanese gay men who ambivalently position Chinese and South Korean tourists as a threat to the status quo of the Japanese gay sub-culture. I suggest that these men draw upon neo-colonial discourses of China and South Korea as ‘backward’, which circulate throughout wider Japanese society to position Chinese and South Korean men as ‘ethnosexual invaders’.     

Fascism as Action through Time (Or How It Can Happen Here)

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how fascism may be identified by its actions, the stages through which a fascist rule takes power, and how to recognize it before it does so. The thesis is that a fascist takeover of a democratic government is rapid and unexpected. Its goal is a revolutionary reversal of representative government in the name of the people, while it accomplishes the opposite: a single-party corporate regime that replaces individual liberty with subtle, bureaucratic, and overt types of coercion. Rather than generate a generic definition of the many types of fascism, it is more useful to study how it affects the lives of ordinary people, the milieu out of which it develops, and what its precursors look like. Understanding fascism entails studying it from the point of view of those who lived under it and recorded their experiences, as well as from the analytic perspectives of social scientists. As Robert O. Paxton observes: “The fascist phenomenon was poorly understood at the beginning in part because it was unexpected.”¹Robert O. Paxton, “The Five Stages of Fascism,” in Fascism: Critical Concepts in Political Science, edited by Roger Griffin, vol. I (2004), Chapter 14, 305–26.View all notes We are facing the question again in 2017 with the surprise election of Donald Trump as the forty-fifth president of the United States by a minority of the popular vote and the evident support of the white nationalist milieu. Paxton proposes a five-stage theory for understanding fascism in its many varieties. A developmental sequence is proposed against which current events in the United States may be assessed.     

The artist as a medium and the artwork as metaphor in Murakami Haruki’s fiction

Abstract

In many of Murakami Haruki’s works, the protagonist is in a profession close to the world of literature, although usually not exactly a writer. In their role as translators, advertising copywriters, journalists, or editors, Murakami’s protagonists are invested with the task of rearranging fragments of reality into narrative or artistic form, and/or of transmitting a message. This process is emotionally charged, often involving a supernatural dimension. While the process of reconstructing a narrative is largely unconscious, the narrator’s choice to act in this capacity is deliberate, and is presented as a way of fulfilling his responsibility towards others. I read this element as an expression of Murakami’s vision of the role of a writer in society. The figure of the artist-narrator takes an interesting form in Kishidanchō-Goroshi (Killing Commendatore, 2017), where the protagonist, a visual artist specialising in realistic portraits, decides to pursue a more creative approach to painting that leads him to a series of supernatural adventures. Through a close reading of the novel, this article investigates how Murakami’s portrayal of the artist as a shaman-like figure functions like a metaphor for the role of the literary author as a catalyst that enables people to connect with their inner self and with each other.     

Contemporary art and unconditionality: ‘the genus of art’ in the art criticism of Chiba Shigeo

This article examines art criticism of the 1980s that sought to address the context and continuity of postwar Japanese avant-garde art. The emphasis is placed on the notion of ‘the genus of art [rui to shite no bijutsu]’, which the art critic Chiba Shigeo discussed in his Gendai bijutsu itsudatsushi (1986). Chiba argued for an autonomous current of postwar Japanese art separate from Western art history but the argument has been largely overshadowed by his ostensible nihonjinron. The term ‘the genus of art’, therefore, has not yet received an adequate critical treatment. The article rephrases this notion as a call for a more inclusive definition of art designed to challenge the conditions that regulate non-Western art. Rather than simply being a nationalist polemic against Western art history from a marginalized place, Japan, ‘the genus of art’ was intended to revitalize and redefine the aims of the avant-garde within the context of ‘contemporary art’. By fleshing out the textual details of ‘the genus of art’ and situating the notion within a larger discourse that interrogated the semiotic role of ‘Japan’ in a global exhibition context, the study repositions Chiba's writing as a potential argument for unconditional acceptance, or unconditionality, as one important ethical contribution of contemporary art.     

Recreating traditional music in postwar Japan: a prehistory of enka

This article examines how enka evolved from the earlier genre of kayōkyoku, looking at the musical markers of Japaneseness and considering issues of authenticity and originality in those earlier genres. The careers of composers Koga Masao and Hattori Ryōichi and singers Misora Hibari and Kasagi Shizuko show the development of a hybrid style of popular song both before and after the Pacific War, which would by the 1960s evolve into enka. As its core audience has aged, enka has become increasingly rigid and concerned with nostalgia for a ‘pure’ Japanese past, even though the music itself is quite distant from traditional musical forms. Analysis of three movie musicals from the late 1940s and early 1950s, Ginza kankan girl, Carmen comes home and Janken girls, also demonstrates the performance practices of popular music at the time, and the complex relationship between popular music and national identity.     

Meiji Japan's China solution to Tokugawa Japan's China problem

The underlying concern of this article is with the function and purpose of the normative imaginary of ‘China’, Chūgoku (Zhongguo) or Chūka (Zhonghua) in the Japanese discourse up to and around the mid-nineteenth century; namely, how it was deployed to make sense of the historical situation facing the contemporaries amid the combined internal and external crises and how it structured the range of options available to them. To exemplify this, we first turn to the debate of the shape of the polity that straddled the critical decades of 1850s–1860s. The self-conscious restoration of a past political ideal was the ostensible justification of the revolutionary overhaul, but in terms of the models of polity, there existed very different versions and understandings of what past could or should be restored. In the classical conceptual language of politics, the choice was between the hōken and gunken model. While the year 1871 saw a closure that cast Meiji as a gunken revolution, the debate continued beyond and the shift of preferences from hōken to gunken needs to be explained. In arguing for Meiji as a ‘Chinese revolution’, we can further point to the surprising degree of overlap between the concerns of earlier Edo-period commentators and the actual factors of the revolution when it finally arrived. Lastly, the normative imaginary of China is shown to have served as the key mediating filter for processing and appropriating the West both before and after the Meiji revolution.     

Science,society and the sea of fertility: new reproductive technologies in Japanese popular culture

Since the late twentieth century, assisted reproductive technologies have brought new challenges to our understanding of the family and gender relations. There are ever-widening gaps between medical practice, legal regulation and everyday understandings and practices. Some recent popular cultural texts in Japan have explored the issues raised by non-commercial surrogate motherhood. The background to these texts is a series of controversies concerning surrogacy and the use of assisted reproductive technologies and wider societal anxieties about family, reproduction and population management. In this article, I will focus on two novels by a medical practitioner and popular novelist who writes under the pseudonym Kaidō Takeru – Gene Waltz (Kaidō 2008) and Madonna Verde (Kaidō 2010) – and the associated film (ōtani 2011) and television series (NHK 2011). The fact that it was the national broadcaster Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai (NHK) that dramatised Madonna Verde suggests that the discussion of these issues was thought to have wide social and cultural resonance. I will place these texts in their social and cultural context with reference to medical, legal and popular discourses on new reproductive technologies in contemporary Japan. These new reproductive technologies have the potential to force a rethinking of masculinity, femininity, parenthood, family and gender relations. The popular texts also, however, draw on pre-existing ways of thinking about masculinity, femininity, marriage, reproduction and the relationships among science, ‘nature’ and society.     

Identity,Insecurity, and Great Power Politics:The Tragedy of German Naval Ambition Before the First World War

Why did Germany pursue naval expansion at the turn of the twentieth century? This question has long puzzled scholars of international security, who consider German naval ambition to be an instance of suboptimal arming—a decision that decreased Germany's overall security and risked the survival of the German state. This article argues that the social desire to be recognized as a world power guided Germany's decision to challenge British naval hegemony. From the beginning of its naval planning, Germany had one clear aim: a powerful fleet of battleships stationed in the North Sea would alter the political relationship with Britain in such a way that it could no longer ignore Germany's claim to world power status. Reconceptualizing Germany's naval ambition as a struggle for recognition elucidates the contradictions at the center of German naval strategy, explaining how the doomed policy could proceed despite its certain failure. The article concludes that the power-maximizing practices of great powers should be seen as an important component of identity construction and an understudied dimension of contemporary security practice.     

Henry Kissinger: Realism,Domestic Politics,and the Struggle Against Exceptionalism in American Foreign Policy

Henry Kissinger was the single most controversial diplomat of the 20th century. This article explores Kissinger's approach to the philosophy of realism in international affairs, his role in Vietnam policy making, and his most recent engagement in the debate over the Iraq War. It argues that Kissinger's realism, although philosophically consistent and having roots within his own life's experience, was always tempered by his desire to exercise influence within the American political system. Once in office under Richard Nixon and then Gerald Ford, Kissinger came to recognise how significantly domestic politics shaped American foreign policy. His involvement in the Vietnam War demonstrates this, and one lesson he took from that conflict was the hope that Americans could be persuaded to move away from their convictions about American exceptionalism and recognise the limits of American power.     

From volunteers to voluntours: shifting priorities in post-disaster Japan

This paper analyses the emergence of post-disaster ‘voluntours’ following Japan's 2011 disasters. An overwhelming, yet haphazard volunteer response to previous disasters spurred extensive collaboration between the state, relief organizations, and would-be volunteers in the wake of 3.11. However, when mapped onto to the massive devastation of the 3.11 disasters, this collaboration almost immediately turned many post-disaster volunteers into ‘voluntourists’, a problematic category commonly associated with visitors from the Global North volunteering for social and environmental causes while on holiday in the Global South. Japan's post-disaster voluntours demonstrate how uncoordinated and potentially risky volunteers have been channelled into a carefully-controlled and long-term response that satisfies people's desire to help disaster victims, while ultimately encouraging tourism (sans volunteering) as the most desirable form of disaster recovery assistance. This shift toward voluntourism potentially undermines post-disaster volunteering and threatens to trap parts of Tōhoku, like other disaster sites, in a position of permanently ‘post-disaster’.     

The National Polity and the formation of the modern national subject in Japan

This article analyses how the concept of Kokutai, or the National Polity, emerged and developed in the course of Japanese modernisation. The National Polity was the central principle that underpinned the mystic and divine authority and sovereignty of the Japanese Emperor (Tennō), and played an ideological role during the Asia Pacific War. Nevertheless, the definition of the National Polity was highly ambiguous and there was no dominant interpretation of the National Polity even in the wartime period from the 1930s to 1940s. In this article, I shall put forward the view that the 1930s and 1940s discourse of the National Polity involved logical or rational ideas that have commonly been thought to be antagonistic to the National Polity; therefore the discourse became complex, ambiguous and paradoxical. This article will elucidate how the discourse of Taishō Democracy, which has been perceived as a major critique of the National Polity, also contributed to the mass-based ideology of the National Polity. In order to examine this problem comprehensively, I will explore various strands of the National Polity debates from the early Meiji period to the 1940s, such as the thought of Itō Hirobumi, Inoue Tetsujirō, Hozumi Yatsuka, Uesugi Shinkichi, Minobe Tatsukichi, Yoshino Sakuzō and Miki Kiyoshi.     

The end of literature and the beginning of praxis: Wagō Ryōichi's Pebbles of Poetry

Abstract

On 16 March 2011, shortly after the hydrogen explosion in the third nuclear block, Wagō Ryōichi (1968–), a poet who has lived in Fukushima for decades, started using Twitter as an alternative method for his action poetry. The tweets from his nearly desolate hometown immediately gained public reception, spreading all across the country and beyond, being compiled into an anthology titled Shi no tsubute (Pebbles of poetry). This study examines the flood of words he posted during the critical post-earthquake turmoil, aiming to conceive them as radically redefining (albeit temporarily) the quotidian that has long been institutionalized during the country's recent history. Despite their later publication in book forms, Wagō's tweets initially circulated more like graffiti than printed books, being a more fundamentally contingent form of writing than his previously printed letters. Epitomizing the bio-sociological conditions (or what Karatani Kōjin calls ‘singularities’) arising from the intensified experience immediately following the Fukushima incident, Wagō's scribbles on the internet bear much resemblance to Terayama Shūji's mobilization of street epic in the 1960s–70s, or, more theoretically, Bergson's conception of evolution as multiplicity arising from intense temporality. His graffiti praxis is itself a renewed ethics, sharing the spirit of the-end-of-literature discourses by Karatani and others since the 1980s.     

Power,Patterns, and Process in European Union History

Sebastian Rosato's admirably provocative Europe United retells the origins of the European Union (EU) as a realist story of the balance of power. While he deserves praise for a bold attempt to extend offensive realism into history's greatest instance of international cooperation, the book ultimately reads as a cautionary methodological tale about how not to support a realist argument. Realist theory has been influential mainly because it offers strong expectations about major patterns in the world—relatively unitary decision-making within states and specific kinds of foreign policies between them—but Rosato's evidence focuses on a thin version of process. He selectively cites leaders' statements about their policy choices across the story, providing no leverage on how these statements related to patterned interests within or across countries. Interestingly, a similar error weakens work by the most salient IR scholar writing on EU history, Andrew Moravcsik. Their shared problems hint at a pattern of IR scholars overlooking patterns in historical evidence.     

Re-animating a radioactive landscape: informal life politics in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster

The earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident of 11 March 2011 posed massive and continuing social challenges to communities in the affected areas. People from wide areas around the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant received vastly conflicting information about the levels of radiation released and about the likely health effects. They were left facing agonising decisions whether to remain and face possible (but uncertain) long-term health risks, or whether to move away, leaving behind homes, friends, jobs, schools and communities. Focusing on the case of the small farming community of Tōwa in Nihonmatsu City, this article examines self-help activities that have emerged in the affected areas in the wake of 3/11. The activities have included community monitoring of radiation levels and collaborative research with academic scientists to explore ways to reduce radioactive contamination in forests, farm soil and crops. The self-help activities of Tōwa residents can be seen as an example of “informal life politics” – that is, of the way in which grassroots groups respond to challenges to their livelihood or way of life by organising themselves and taking actions outside the sphere of formal governmental structures. It is argued here that the residents of Tōwa were able to respond rapidly to the challenges of the Fukushima disaster because they had already developed informal life politics practices in response to earlier challenges of local economic decline and depopulation. I also suggest that, in responding to the Fukushima disaster, the relationship between the people of Tōwa and their landscape has been profoundly changed, and that this change has implications not just for the community itself but also for the wider world.     

Medicating the salaryman lifestyle: fear-based marketing of liver stimulant drugs in postwar Japan

This article studies the heretofore unexplored fear-based print marketing campaigns for postwar hangover remedies and liver drugs sold by Japan's leading drug manufacturers of the 1950s, including Chūgai, Takeda, Tanabe, Sankyō, and Yamanouchi. It reveals that these drugs were creatively and predatorily marketed to salarymen and their wives in hundreds of newspaper and magazine ads that raised the spectre of liver damage and related diseases due to overconsumption of alcohol and tobacco. It demonstrates that the makers claimed not only that their formulations could remedy liver damage, but could even serve as prophylactics that would guard against the dangers of alcohol and nicotine poisoning and enable users to drink and smoke to excess without fear. The robust copy and clever imagery appearing in the ads also illustrate the social pressures facing salarymen to drink with colleagues after work on an almost nightly basis, as well as at a series of seasonal office parties and gatherings throughout the year. This article is the first to examine how drug makers took aim at some of postwar Japan's leading causes of ill health, alcohol and tobacco abuse, as well as chemical poisonings and even morning sickness, by selling an array of ineffectual drugs based on untested and dubious claims. It charts the drug makers' increasingly outlandish ads, the slow realization that their drugs were potentially hazardous, and their swift withdrawal from the market by 1960. It argues that, amidst a rise in alcohol overconsumption and comparatively lax testing and marketing regulations, Japan's postwar pharmaceutical firms exaggerated and preyed upon consumer health concerns in hundreds of frightening and pseudoscientific ads for largely untested and potentially hazardous drugs.     

Hirohito and General Douglas MacArthur: The First Meeting as Documented by Shōwa tennō jitsuroku

This analysis allows readers to confront for themselves the 27 September 1945 meeting between the Shōwa Emperor and General Douglas MacArthur, as recently documented by Japan’s Imperial Household Agency. It also introduces readers to a long-standing debate amongst Japanese scholars that has received no attention in English-language literature. The debate centres on the question as to whether the emperor offered at this meeting to take responsibility for the war fought in his name. This analysis offers its own conclusions and suggests that the emperor in all probability offered to take responsibility for the war.